The industry related to the use of reactors subject to pressure—including the nuclear and petrochemical industry—uses such sleeves as constituents of reactor vessels or pressurizers. These sleeves may be manufactured by bonding two initially separate sleeves each made by any method, or a sleeve and a strip to be arranged on a surface of the sleeve. The outer sleeve may for example be in low carbon steel of the 16MND5 type and the inner sleeve may be in austenitic stainless steel of the 304L type initially as a strip.
The outer carbon steel sleeve may be obtained by forging, and the internal stainless steel sleeve may, as this was said, be formed by a strip which is bonded on the inner surface of the outer sleeve. In a non-limiting way, the inner diameter of the internal sleeve may be comprised between 2 and 9 meters, its height may be comprised between 2 and 5 meters, the thicknesses of the sleeves may be of the order of 50 mm to 600 mm for the external sleeve and of 5 mm to 100 mm for the internal sleeve.
This relatively simple solution to be applied is however not optimum, since this is a method which takes a long time to apply. For a reactor core sleeve having the aforementioned dimensions, the bonding and the quality control of the bond may take between 5 and 10 weeks—the duration varying according to the inner dimensions of the sleeve and to the desired bonding layer thickness. The quality of the bonding has to be checked very carefully and depends on the applied detection criteria.